Sacré Bleu

“I don’t think he is,” said Henri. “I think he

is just eccentric.”

“Well his father was a lunatic,” said Lucien, draining the last of his beer as well.

“So is my father and so was your father.”

“Well, yes, he was eccentric.”

“Then shall we go see if Le Professeur has found the secret of our Colorman’s paints?”

“SHOULDN’T WE BE GOING TO THE ACADÉMIE?” ASKED LUCIEN AS THEY MADE their way down the back of the butte and through the Maquis. It was well past midday now and there was all manner of industry, from goat milking to rag picking to rat racing, going on in the shantytown. (Yes, real rat racing. The old Professeur had never been able to train his rats to perform Ben-Hur, but when he died, the junior Bastard gave the track and the race-trained rodents to some local boys, who started a betting operation. They were grown men now and had staged twenty races a day for nearly fifteen years. In doing so they had also managed to prove that even in the most squalid slum, full of bandits, beggars, whores, con men, lechers, drunkards, layabouts, and egregious weasels, it was possible to attract an even more unsavory element. Le Professeur Deux, pioneering the budding demi-science of sociology, had done a study.)

“He told me he would be home today,” said Henri, who snatched up his walking stick and tapped on Le Professeur’s weathered plank door with the brass pommel. There was the sound of steam being vented, as if several espresso machines were all winding down at once, and the Professeur Émile Bastard opened the door and stepped awkwardly out of the doorway, nearly bumping his head on one of the open ceiling rafters.

“Gentlemen. Welcome. Come in, please. I’ve been expecting you. Lucien, so good to see you.”

“And you,” said Lucien.

Toulouse-Lautrec limped in but looked over his shoulder at Lucien and whispered, “I stand corrected. He is a lunatic.”

Lucien nodded in agreement as he shook hands with Professeur Bastard. The Professeur was a very tall man—his thin, aquiline aspect put one in mind of a tweedy wading bird of some sort, an academically inclined egret, perhaps—but today he stood at least a foot taller than his normal height. He had to duck under each ceiling joist as he led them into the parlor in halting, careful steps. Bastard was wearing some kind of stilts under his trousers, fitted with shoes to appear to be his own feet. They crunched hazelnut shells strewn across the floor as he walked.

“Gentlemen, please sit down.” Bastard gestured to two chairs, then reached into his trouser pocket and activated some sort of switch. Again there was the sound of gases venting, and Bastard lowered into a sitting position in a series of pneumatic jerks.

Lucien and Henri did not sit, they just stared. While Le Professeur was sitting, he wasn’t sitting on anything. He was simply maintaining a sitting position in midair, like one of those annoying street performers one encountered around Paris who were always walking in the wind, or climbing imaginary stairs, or getting trapped in invisible boxes from which they could only be extracted by the donation of a ten-centime piece or a gendarme with a billy club.

“Sit, sit, sit,” said Le Professeur.

“But, monsieur?” said Lautrec, waving at the Professeur in the manner of a magician presenting a freshly bisected assistant. “You are—”

“I am quite comfortable,” said Bastard. He reached into his pocket, clicked some sort of switch, and with a hiss and a click, he stood to attention, his head barely missing a ceiling beam. He lifted his trouser cuffs to reveal, extending from his shoes, a leg-shaped frame of brass rods, with pistons suspended in the center. “What do you think?”

“You are certainly tall,” said Henri.

“I built them for you,” said the Professeur. “They are entirely too tall for me. They’ll still have to be fitted to you, but I think you’ll find they function quite efficiently.”

“For what?” asked Henri.

“For effortless ambulation, of course. I call them Loco-ambulators, or steam stilts.”

There was another hiss of steam being released and Lucien thought he smelled something burning.

“Help me out of them, I’ll show you.”

With the Professeur’s instruction, they first lowered him to the floor, so he was sitting splay legged, then helped him unfasten leather straps and buckles until he was able to wriggle out of his trousers, leaving the steam stilts on the floor and the Professeur to pace in his underwear and socks as he lectured.

“I had noticed, when you visited before, that walking came to you with great difficulty and pain. Given your royal lineage, I deduced that this problem was one caused perhaps by your parents having been too closely related by blood.”

“And I fell off a horse and broke my legs when I was a boy,” said Henri, somewhat amused by the Professeur’s pompousness, despite that he was wearing a tailcoat and no pants. (The tailcoat had concealed a small condensation chamber that was part of the steam stilts and rested across the small of the back.)

“Just so,” said the Professeur, charging on, lifting the steam stilts to their feet as he spoke, so they stood there, a gleaming bronze skeleton (sans torso) with its trousers around its ankles. “I thought to relieve you of some of the effort, since you live on Montmartre, and climbing stairs and hills obviously caused you pain. At first I thought, wheels, but soon I realized that not only would wheels be conspicuous in company, they were useless on stairs. I designed the first set of walkers with Tesla motors, but the battery that would be required to run the machine would have been so heavy as to preclude your actually accompanying your legs.”

“So my legs might have gone out drinking without me?”

“Possibly,” snapped the Professeur. “Then it was clear that combustion was the only way to release enough energy to power you and still have the machine compact enough to be concealed. Steam was the answer. I designed the steam stilts so that by merely making the movement you normally make by walking, your legs would activate a series of switches and valves that extend and contract these pistons. You put out no more effort than if you were moving your legs underwater.”

“I see,” said Henri. “Now I must ask you, before you go any farther, and this is important: Do you have any brandy or cognac in the house?”